Professor Dale Barker

Dale leads Data Assimilation and Ensembles (DAE) section of Weather Science, which undertakes research and development in observations processing, data assimilation and ensemble forecasting.

Current activities

Dale's activities are split between his management role as Head of DAE and contributions towards a number of ongoing research projects:

Dale is leading the effort to develop a European regional reanalysis within the EU co-funded EURO4M project (2010-2014). The effort will ultimately provide a high-resolution, multi-year synthesis of meteorological observations and NWP model information via state-of-the-art regional 4D-Var data assimilation.

Dale's research interests also include advanced 'hybrid' data assimilation algorithms that make use of short-range ensemble forecasts as proxies for forecast errors within current generation four-dimensional variational (4D-Var) data assimilation systems.

Career Background

Dale's meteorological career began in 1993 when he joined the Met Office following a PhD (Sussex) and post doc (Manchester) in astrophysical magnetohydrodynamics. Between 1993 and 1999 Dale worked within the data assimilation team to develop the Met Office's three-dimensional variational (3D-Var) data assimilation scheme. Dale was also responsible for the Met Office's first in-house ensemble prediction system (based on the 'error-breeding' method) for use within hybrid variational/ensemble data assimilation.